I use an online reference database called PEP (Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing) for research. It has more than 100K entries. I use Mac OS. They make the database available as a downloadable EndNotes .refer file, which is UT 8 (I think ... it's the international format). They also do not offer support for import issues if the user is not using EndNotes. I can import the file into Bookends with either of the EndNotes formats available.

However, the imported database is corrupted ... dates are wildly wrong, many references don't appear, etc. I've tried it a few times, and tried the rebuild option. I've tried to figure out what to do next but am stumped.

I'm new to reference management ... so I don't have EndNote. If this might be helpful, here's what's on the PEP site:

"This option, for PEP Subscribers only, lets you download an EndNote importable version of the bibliographic information for articles and books on PEP-Web. The file is in Refer format. Refer format is very simple and can also be used to load the bibliographic information from PEP into other reference program databases.

The PEP Bibliography file version is dated January 24, 2018. It is a 20.7 MB file in Unicode/UTF-8 format (to handle characters from multiple languages). When importing, depending on the application, you may need to specify this format in the import dialog,, e.g., with Endnote X6, in the Import File dialog select:

I need you to send me a file -- *not* an enormous 21 MB file, a file just containing one reference. If you can't do that, open the 21 MB file and copy/paste just *one* reference from it in the forum (or send it to me). I'll see if it's really Refer or something else.